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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 22. 14th September 1972

Aboriginal Poet

Aboriginal Poet

Kath Walker was born in 1920, a member of the Noonuccal tribe of Stradbroke Island, Queensland. Her tribal totem is the carpet snake.

Her schooling began at Dunwich on Stradbroke Island, and ended, when aged 13, she was employed as a domestic in Brisbane.

Three years later, Kath was rejected for nurse training because she was an Aborigine. With the onset of World War Two, she served as a telephonist in the A.W.A.S., and married, and when aged 37, she went back to school under a repatriation scheme for servicemen and women, coming out as a stenographer. But it is in the field of literature in particular, that Kath Walker is largely self-taught.

Second only to C.J. Dennis as a best-selling Australian poet, Kath has successfully published four books since 1964:

We Are Going, Brisbane, 1964, (Jacaranda Press); New York, 1965.

The Dawn Is At Hand. Brisbane, 1966, (Jacaranda Press);

My People: a Kath Walker Collection. Milton Queensland, 1970, (Jacaranda Press);

Stradbroke Dreamtime, Brisbane, 1972, (Angus and Robertson Ltd.).

The first three books are collections of verse and some of Kath's addresses, all with a principal theme of the Aborigine heritage, and the current state of Australian race relations.

Kath Walker's is no narrow racial outlook. Rather it is a more universalist approach to race. Or as James Devaney expresses it in his foreward to her first book:

"She believes in the common brotherhood of man and dislikes the patrioteer nationalism that divides men."

For example from her verse:

"......I'm for humankind, not colour jibes,
I'm international, and never mind tribes.
".......I'm international, never mind place,
I'm for humanity, all one race."

(-"All One Race", My People, page 1.)

In this regard, Kath differs quite substantially from her eldest son, Denis, and other more firebrand younger advocates of Aborigine rights. Yet she too argues for "Black Power" - Aborigine control over their reserve affairs, and title to their ancestral lands.

Drawing of fists in handcuffs

Stradbroke Dreamtime, a somewhat different departure for Kath, is a collection of personal childhood reminiscences, and Aborigine folk tales, for children. (To be released in New Zealand in conjunction with her visit.)

Though not of full Aborigine blood, and "fully accepted and accepting" in the white community, she puts her race first, and is a dedicated worker for the advancement of Aborigine civil rights.... Until recently Kath was Queensland State Secretary of the Federal Council of the Aboriginal Advancement League, Honorary Secretary for the Queensland State Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, and an executive member of the Union of Australian Women. She was a leader in the Aborigine education scholarship fund "Abschol", and took a leading part in the negotiations with Prime Ministers Menzies and Holt which led to the referendum of May 1967 which decided that Aborigines too should be included in the census as Australian citizens and have the vote.

In the 1969 Federal elections Kath stood unsuccessfully as an Australian Labour Party candidate for the Green-slopes constituency.

Awarded an M.B.E. in June 1970 in recognition of her work for Aborigine rights, and a Justice of the Peace, she is still "...busy speaking from various platforms on behalf of my people." And at the present time, at her home on Stradbroke Island, she is engaged in developing a cultural centre and museum to preserve the culture and history of the Aborigine and white people who have lived on the island, and hopes to write a history of the Aborigine tribes who once inhabited Stradbroke Island.

Now widowed, Kath Walker has two married sons, and three grandchildren.